This isn’t a new story, of course, but I’ve been intrigued by it ever since I first heard about the Ramon diary on the radio a couple of years ago. The above page was found almost two months after the Columbia disaster that killed Ramon and six other astronauts. There is not much out there on him, so I had to settle for a young reader’s biography on him.

Briefly, Ilan Ramon had been a colonel in the Israeli Air Force (IAF), the same one that is maligned day in and day out in the world media. Ramon had actually been one of the pilots on the bombing mission to take out Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981, Operation Opera. According to my little book, by Devra Newberger Speregen, Ramon’s bomb was one of the one’s to do in the nuclear arsenal. Speregen relates the following anecdote:

Commander Yadlin (of the IAF) later remembered something Ilan told him at the time they were preparing for the Iraqi attack: “If I can prevent a second Holocaust, I’m ready to sacrifice my life for this.”

Ramon’s words pre-date Operation Shylock, the novel by Philip Roth in which the possibility of a second Holocaust is posited rather convincingly. Ron Rosenbaum took up the theme in 2002:

The Second Holocaust. It’s a phrase we may have to begin thinking about. A possibility we may have to contemplate. A reality we may have to witness. Somebody has to think about the unthinkable, about the unbearable, and the way it looks now, it’s at least as likely to happen as not. One can imagine several ways it will happen: the current, terrible situation devolves from slow-motion mutual slaughter into instantaneous conflagration, nuclear, chemical or biological. Scenarios that remain regional. Scenarios that go global.

Can we allow ourselves the bliss of ignorance at a time like this?